We’re long over due for a media roundup and with March being a busy month with the MindTouch 2009 release, OSBC, and Web 2.0 Expo there are definitely some publications and buzz worth mentioning. Last month’s announcement of MindTouch 2009 was timed for the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo and was well received with a lot of great publications picking up the story and providing commentary. In no particular order here’s some excerpts and link-love:

MindTouch has released MindTouch 2009, an enhanced developer platform for building collaborative enterprise applications and communities. The new version includes four important features for enterprise companies considering open source collaboration:

A bi-directional messaging bus serves as a switchboard for every system, application and workgroup. Users can set up and receive change notifications when changes are made within MindTouch 2009 or to applications that users plug into MindTouch 2009, such as enterprise systems, databases, office productivity applications, Web services, etc.

Developers now have the freedom to more efficiently develop rich Internet applications and deploy collaborative apps for business automation.

Platform extensibility with a front-end plug-in architecture that enables developers to extend or modify MindTouch’s front-end without affecting the ability to upgrade the software.

This release solidifies Mindtouch’s strength as the leading open source collaboration platform while enabling new levels of connectivity between apps. Adding the sophisticated new notification services of team and user content updates and it’s not hard to see Mindtouch’s hundreds of thousands of installations being upgraded to full platform status, and attracting others to use this flexible software as their collaborative foundation.

MindTouch Deki is an open-source application for enterprise collaboration that sports a wiki-like interface. It allows users to organize raw data into actionable information and ensures that it’s dynamically updated from disparate, disconnected data sources.

Slated to be released in early 2009, MindTouch Deki Lyons will expose more ways to interact with the core Deki application by coupling Deki’s traditional mashup strengths with new tools for developers, such as the ability to trigger actions based on activity inside Deki or use a built-in local storage mechanism.

Developers can build rich Internet applications taking advantage of integration between DekiScript and JavaScript utilizing JEM (JavaScript with Events and Messages) technology. DekiScript is a scripting language for mashing up data from Deki, which serves as a base platform for MindTouch. With JEM, developers can leverage DekiScript and JavaScript technology to build AJAX-based composite applications, mashups, and interactive portals.

JEM also enables visualization of data sources and supports XML literals and better URI string manipulation for building dynamic page links. Dynamic list and map construction is supported as well. The list and map capability enables, for example, listing of customer orders above a certain amount and sales by region.

This week, DealRadar moves away from social media gaming and back to open source, this time with a focus on enterprise collaboration and service-oriented architecture, an area essential to the development of new ways of delivering software. MindTouch Deki, the flagship product of San Diego-based MindTouch,is an open source enterprise collaboration and community platform. This allows users to connect and remix enterprise systems, social tools and web services.

[...]

MindTouch aims to differentiate itself from the crowded collaboration software market by its orchestration engine, underlined by its enterprise wiki interface. As social software is on the rise, more organizations are tapping into the collective intelligence and knowledge of their systems and employees to improve operational efficiencies and productivity. Externally, they’re looking to collaborate and share information with individuals such as their partners, members, alumni, resellers, distributors, developers or customers in order to create vibrant communities.

This is the first in series of posts covering the Web 2.0 Expo starting today at the Moscone Center, in San Francisco, California. I am very excited about the number of companies offering Enterprise 2.0 tools, platforms for developers and end-(business)-users at the event this year. Many of these companies have plans to announce exciting new social-sharing features and tools at the show, stay tuned for more details.

MindTouch is an open source enterprise collaboration and community platform that enables users to connect and remix enterprise systems, social tools and web services. The MindTouch Deki i’s built with a Web Oriented Architecture (WOA), enables users to connect teams, enterprise systems, publishing systems, Web services and Web 2.0 applications to create unique content oriented experiences while maintaining IT governance.

The software seems like it could be pretty useful to businesses when trying to seamlessly collaborate content and IT teams across a web platform. And MindTouch offers a free open source software core and offers premium services starting at $2,000. Its wiki-like platform is appealing to businesses big and small, and the open source ideation seems to provide for an innovative product that simplifies complex interactions.

MindTouch announced the release of MindTouch 2009, an enhanced developer platform for building rich collaborative applications and communities, and a new bi-directional message bus that further extends MindTouch’s collaborative capabilities. With the new bi-directional messaging bus users are now able to setup and receive change notifications when changes are made within MindTouch 2009 or to the many applications that users plug into MindTouch 2009, such as enterprise systems, databases, office productivity applications, web services, and more. Users can now choose to receive an email that notifies them when a specific page changes, or when certain files are revised, or when new users are added to the system. MindTouch 2009 offers users an auto-complete suggest feature that displays existing tags when a user wants to add new tags to a page, and also offers instant page associations without search indexing delays. MindTouch 2009 enables developers to build Rich Internet applications (RIA) by taking advantage of the new integration between DekiScript and Javascript, utilizing the JEM (JavaScript with Events and Messages) technology.

MindTouch is one of my favorite wikis – or it was until it became much more than a wiki, more of a development environment with a wiki at the core. It’s still one of my favourites, not least because its CEO, the ebullient Aaron Roe Fulkerson is such a lovable and crazy chap. Plus Mindtouch is open source which is all goodness.

We particularly like the Office document editing and write back capability. No more need to save a local copy of the document on your desktop. But you may get off on the advanced permissioning system, the updated revision comparison or the enhancements to the Control panel that provide better deployment administration.

Giving developers all this capability and flexibility? As social computing solutions start to become more commoditized, it is good to see that some vendors leave room to grow.

MindTouch 2009 is a commercial collaboration product which originally evolved from a wiki. The underlying core framework is open source and is distributed under the GPL.

In the new version, the developers have augmented the product’s extensibility in an effort to make it easier to integrate MindTouch with workflows that involve external tools. The new messaging bus can serve as an interoperability bridge between various components in a company’s publishing and collaboration ecosystem. One example cited by MindTouch is the ability to synchronize data between MindTouch 2009 and a WordPress blog.

Collaboration platform maker MindTouch launched a new version of its namesake product at the show. MindTouch 2009 is a development platform for RIAs with an extended JavaScript library built on jQuery and Tibco’s PageBus. This version improves on the MindTouch integrated scripting language, DekiScript, the company says. Developers can use the tool to create rich AJAX composite apps, mashups and interactive portals. It also has a feature that allows devs to manipulate and visualize data from various sources. Based in San Diego, MindTouch is the company behind Deki, a commercially supported, open source collaboration platform. It’s a combination of a wiki and an app-dev platform.

Java Entrepreneur

Introducing MindTouch 2009Jeff Goldman
MindTouch today announced the release of MindTouch 2009, “extending the development platform’s collaboration capabilities through a bidirectional message bus,” according to InfoWorld’s Paul Krill. “With the bus, push-based e-mail notifications can be sent. MindTouch is an open source platform for building enterprise collaborative applications
and communities. It offers a development paradigm for composite applications to connect teams, applications, and systems.”

“MindTouch is now positioning itself as a development platform for ‘Rich Internet Applications’ with this release: developers are able to more efficiently develop and deploy collaborative applications for business automation, which are highly needed in today’s distributed, heterogeneous environment,” notes ZDNet’s Oliver Marks. “This is achieved by taking advantage of the new integration between DekiScript (MindTouch’s scripting language) and JavaScript, enabled by utilizing the JEM (JavaScript with Events and Messages) technology. (JEM is an augmented JavaScript with event coordination and message passing that creates a rich user experience similar to desktop applications).”

One thing I have always wanted to do is have multiple properties that could be orchestrated from a central engine. I haven’t come close to doing it, but one reason I adopted Mindtouch Deki for my personal site was the possibility of using it to drive services and integrating into my other properties over time (some day). Today the folks at Mindtouch announced a new version which enhances that by adding a 2 way messaging bus. That gives me all kinds of ideas for my own stuff if I ever get to it. But there are other ideas to consider, and perhaps this is the kind of environment that you can use for a lot of research activities.

Lets say you are building a lab system that has multiple components, perhaps a poor man’s LIMS, Lab Notebook, etc. You can use Mindtouch as the central portal with changes being driven in two directions, so you can have an instrument update Mindtouch and vice versa. You can subscribe to a page and get email notifications as well, and a much better plugin interface. The interesting part of this update is that Mindtouch (and other similar platforms) are going beyond the traditional limits of a Wiki. For some tasks, classic Wiki functionality, I would still recommend Mediawiki, but if you want a platform for collaborative content management and orchestration, I think Mindtouch has made some great strides going beyond those constraints. I am looking forward to playing with the new version.

MindTouch Deki Wiki is the most sophisticated wiki-based collaboration offering in the market. MindTouch Mobile is an iPhone-optimized skin which is accessible through the iPhone web browser. It is geared to help readers consume and share data inside MindTouch.

MindTouch announced the release of MindTouch 2009, their developer platform for building rich collaborative applications and communities. With the addition of an extensible messaging bus, MindTouch 2009 automatically pushes notifications to users of commonly requested system events and page or hierarchy changes. Also, the messaging bus can serve as a switchboard for outside systems, applications and services, making it easier for MindTouch to connect disconnected systems and teams. For example, content change notifications can be automatically pushed out from the MindTouch platform to a variety of places, selected by the user, such as email, mobile devices, or even Twitter and WordPress blogs.

Users can now choose to receive an email that notifies them when a specific page changes, or when certain files are revised, or when new users are added to the system. In addition to the new messaging bus, MindTouch adds an auto-suggest feature that displays existing tags and also offers instant page associations without search indexing delays. MindTouch 2009 enables developers to build rich Internet applications (RIA) by taking advantage of an extended Javascript library built on JQuery and Tibco’s Pagebus and named JEM (JavaScript with Events and Messaging) technology and major improvements to the MindTouch integrated scripting language DekiScript. MindTouch DekiScript enhancements include: support for XML literals; support for better URI string manipulation; support for generated sequences of values; and, support for dynamic list and map construction to create dynamic lists, e.g., customer orders above a certain amount, sales by region, etc. MindTouch offers a free open source software core and offers additional services and tools tailored for enterprise productivity enhancement, starting at $2,000.

In the spirit of Che Guevara, MindTouch rallied the crowd at Web 2.0 Expo last week with its social enterprise collaboration revolution. Bubblicious Reporter Jolie O’Dell caught up with the MindTouch team to learn about the newly launched MindTouch 2009, an enhanced developer platform for building rich collaborative applications and communities, and a new bi-directional message bus that further extends MindTouch’s powerful collaborative capabilities.MindTouch Marketing Manager Sarah Carr explains how MindTouch is revolutionizing the way people and businesses collaborate using MindTouch’s open source enterprise collaboration platform; and MindTouch Sales Engineer Mike Diliberto talks about the new MindTouch 2009.

There can be no doubt that one of the hottest spaces in enterprise software today is collaboration. It’s no surprise collaboration is getting a lot of interest. The old metaphors for capturing, authoring and sharing information are stale and inefficient. As such, there is a lot of room for achieving productivity improvements through improved user experience. This has been true for all software, but especially so in the enterprise software space where collaboration is essential to daily operation and where every ounce of productivity translates into big dollars.

In the last several years a software renaissance has been taking place in the consumer space that has begun seeping into, and benefiting, business and enterprise systems. The innovation in software during this renaissance, more commonly referred to as Web 2.0, has been almost entirely about improving user experience metaphors. AJAX, new social metaphors, lessening of the file system metaphor, making structure implicit rather than explicit and just generally simplifying user interfaces are all trends evidenced in this new wave of software. While most pundits think “Web 2.0” has been about making the Web participatory, enabling social connectedness and conversations these are but side effects of the improved ease of use and increased stickiness (fun of use) software has experienced.

As mentioned, the innovation in the consumer space is now seeping into business and enterprise software. To date, this has largely translated into a repurposing of consumer applications for the enterprise in an almost direct mapping. That is to say, not a lot of innovation is happening there. Enterprise social networking startups are trying their damndest to convince companies they need Facebook in the enterprise. Social bookmarking, video sharing, blogging, microblogging, mind-mapping, etc. are all attempting to re-imagine how people work. Alas, individually these applications don’t deliver for the enterprise in a meaningful way without the network effect of their consumer counterparts. Enter the suites.

Enterprise 2.0 Suite vendors have recently captured media and analyst attention and are hastily developing products that combine aspects of many of the aforementioned Web 2.0 / Social Media tools in a race to fulfill the feature check list. Trying to be everything to everyone, the feature check list approach to software development, is never pretty. We played this out in the 90’s and learned that it leads to crappy unusable software that may look good on paper, but is useless in practice. The Enterprise 2.0 Suites consistently force the enterprise to adapt their workflow to this new application instead of enabling the application to be adapted to the needs, workflow and existing systems of the enterprise landscape. The result is yet another silo that is difficult to get data into, out of, integrate, extend, reuse, secure, maintain…. Moreover, in the haste to check the feature boxes vendors are making rookie engineering mistakes regarding scaling and security. In short, it’s a band aid that’s sure to cause an expensive infection.

And then there is MindTouch. When Steve and I first approached the problem of collaboration we came at it with a background in distributed systems. This lead us to solve the problem of enterprise collaboration with a completely different approach than any one else attacking the problem. We saw collaboration as a distributed heterogeneous network that needed an easy to use canvas to surface data and behavior. Think about this a moment. Any modern company has a multiplicity of disconnected data and application silos. Email, databases, files, file servers, Intranet, CRM, ERP and a growing cloud of useful web-services. It’s clear the enterprise desperately needs a new kind of tool to connect all these systems and services and enable easy collaboration across all of them.

Let’s think a little more about the problem of the modern enterprise. This isn’t a problem that would be nice to solve. This is a problem that desperatelyneeds to be solved for the enterprise. We are bleeding here! We are hemorrhaging money! Please make it stop! Just getting access to information we need to do our work is difficult if not impossible. When, and if, you get access to requisite data from CRM, databases, web services, etc…massaging these pieces into actionable information is again painful and time consuming. When successful, what fruits do your labors yield? A static (dead) document or file that is likely trapped in email, a network file server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server or your local computer. In short, this is yet another disconnected silo. Never to be seen again or reused. The next time you need similar actionable information you repeat the process anew and it is just as time consuming and painful. This is fundamentally broken and it’s killing the productivity of every company.

Now let’s look at how MindTouch is solving this problem for the enterprise. Less technical persons (not necessarily programmers) can connect disconnected enterprise systems, databases, Web 2.0 apps, web-services with MindTouch pre-built adapters. This can be done securely and with IT governance, but it’s even easy for business units to do this on their own. Then anyone (of any technical aptitude) can access information from these disconnected silos, mash it up, make it actionable, create dynamic documents that are updated (effectively) real-time from multiple data source and web-services. If you aren’t a MindTouch Deki user then allow me to describe this for you. Imagine a Microsoft-Word-like document in your web browser that allows you real-time access to information in CRM, your legacy intranet, Microsoft Access (and other databases), LinkedIn, Twitter, Google or other APIs and more. All in an easy to edit Word Processor like experience that is easily shared with others, versioned and searchable with a powerful enterprise search engine. I reiterate, your data is dynamically updated for you (or you can take a snapshot in time).

MindTouch is enabling business/enterprise automation that is saving companies millions. Yes, millions of dollars. See Red Mountain Retail Group case study (25% productivity gain across the entire company) and Bill Me Later, which was recently acquired by eBay for $945 Million. Bill Me Later’s use of MindTouch was a feature article in the New York Times; they enjoy a 1,000 to 1 return on investment (ROI) in the first year. One significant cause for these huge gains is because MindTouch does not force users to adapt workflow and processes to the product. Instead, MindTouch is easily adapted to existing workflows, systems and processes and effectively extends and upgrades other systems. There is no other product that enables this without investing in expensive and time consuming software engineers. And in these cases, which include portal solutions, the end product is something that is inflexible, doesn’t enable collaboration and requires another team of software engineers to re-engineer as needs evolve. Not so with MindTouch. The platform is easily adapted to evolving needs without necessarily requiring any engineering resources; most often this is accomplished by less technical business or IT persons using pre-built enterprise adapters.

Newer Enterprise 2.0 or Collaboration tools are busying themselves with checking feature boxes, adding low value, nice to have, social tools with limited payoff and delivering products that have issues with scale and security. This approach forces users to adapt to the vendor’s view of the world and creates a simplistic walled garden. Another silo. Meanwhile, the older enterprise portal vendors are hurriedly snapping in place sub-standard bolt-ons to check their feature boxes and re-messaging their stale products with prefixed words like “social”. Neither are appropriate solutions for the enterprise. Neither will provide as much ROI or a lower of total cost of ownership (TCO) than MindTouch. On one hand, the newer vendors are not customizeable, difficult to scale and non-extensible. On the other hand, older vendors are delivering clunky, non-collaborative, difficult to use solutions that require significant engineering resources to extend and adapt. MindTouch evolved from both these worlds and has moved the solution “up the stack”. We invested the time and resources to develop a robust, scalable, easily extensible, easily integrated distributed platform that is adaptable to the needs, workflows and IT ecosystems of the enterprise.

Contact MindTouch or join us in one of our weekly webinars to better understand how MindTouch is an evolutionary leap ahead of the competition in terms of technology and the ability of our products to deliver ROI at a dramtically lower TCO.

I returned late Friday night from a week of networking and socializing that left me exhausted and ready for bed. Needless to say it was an awesome event that was jam packed with exciting “Web 2.0″ news and many of the web’s top names.

The expo took place from Tuesday to Friday. As it is one of the larger expo’s of the year the attendees were in no short supply. Etelos, Microsoft and IBM took the big booths and scattered amongst the crowd were companies like Coghead, Mashable, Bungee Connect, Technorati and yours truly, MindTouch. As always we didn’t let the other vendors get in our way. Everything from our live demos to our 6′ rabbit had people swarming to us. Fortunately for us the most common response was “wow”.

I wasn’t able to attend any of the sessions, however, my twitter friends kept me fully informed. Coincidentally, there was apparently a terrific session on twitter and I thought the deliverance was fairly innovative. The presenter kept a full screen view of his twitter account on the screen and addressed questions from the audience as they were tweeted in. Fairly unique if you ask me!

As was expected, the late night agenda of socializing was plentiful. Tuesday night was the Digg Party, Wednesday the Mashable/Chi.mp party and Thursday was the highly talked about NetVibes party. Each event seemed to be a who’s who of social media as technology leaders and “weblebrity’s” were everywhere. I personally enjoyed the NetVibes event the most which closed down around 2am and was packed with technology superstars. Fortunately the only commonality between the events were the MindTouch stickers plastered all over everyone and everywhere.

Overall Web 2.0 proved to be one of the better events of the year. I met a ton of great people and MindTouch was undeniably very noticed. Our next big show is OSCON which takes place in mid July in Portland, Oregon. If you’re going to be there drop me an email (damienH[at]mindtouch.com) and I’ll make sure I bring you one of our infamous “rabbits” t-shirts.